So today we’ll look into all the ways internal links might be hampering your site’s performance.

1. Revising Website Structure

An optimized website is a structured website.

Too many websites have no clear organization at all.

Why does this happen?

Typically, it’s because website content is added sporadically, without any actual strategy. Sometimes this is due to business needs changing and things that were once important no longer are.

To figure out what you’re working with, you need to get a bird’s eye view of your website architecture.

Ensuring a Consistent Structure

As Google’s John Mueller puts it, the way your pages are interlinked provides Google with “context.”

Internal links helps the search engine understand how your pages are related and what their roles are.

So you need to make sure your website is not a mess of randomly interlinked pages. This make the site’s context unclear.

You also need to make sure the type of structure you use is actually the optimal one.

Which one is the one depends greatly on your business needs, but here are some options to consider:

A flat website structure is when there’re only two levels of hierarchy implied – the homepage itself and the rest of the pages (linked to directly from the homepage). Obviously, this one can only fit smaller websites and becomes really confusing when we’re talking hundreds and thousands of pages.

A pyramid structure is when you start with the homepage and go down to categories, subcategories and single pages within them. That’s one of the most common ways to arrange an ecommerce store.

A thematically clustered structure is when you group your content by themes. And not in a pyramid manner, but rather having one “pillar” page in each cluster and a number of subordinate pages supporting it. The pillar page, in this case, covers the topic in general. While the subordinate ones, focusing on specific long tails, all link back to the “pillar”, thus “voting” for its authority on the topic:

This tactic got especially popular with websites relying heavily on blogging and proved itself well in some experiments.

Eliminating Orphan Pages

Another pretty common issue is orphans – the pages that got left out from your website structure altogether, because:

They have no internal links pointing to them. Quite likely, these are some older pages that had been linked to from removed content or new pages you forgot to include into the navigation.

You’ve messed up with nofollowing and noindexing. Like if you decided to remove your paginated pages (I’ve seen people do so…) from Google’s index. The deeper pages the paginated pages linked to would remain reachable to users, but not to Google bot:

The problem with fixing orphan pages is that they’re hard to find.

You might search for them in the XML sitemap (in case they were added to the sitemap but not the navigation) and Google index (in case Google knows about them because of external links).

Also, fire up a crawling tool to scan your website as the Google bot does and check if any disallow instructions are standing in its way.

Fixing Content Duplication

Another common issue is that inconsistent interlinking might create duplicated versions of your pages.

Like when some of your internal links have trailing slashes, and some of them don’t. In case there’s no redirect set up, these two URLs look as if separate duplicate pages:

https://example.com/page1/

https://example.com/page1

The same thing might be happening with www and non-www versions of your site, tracking parameters in the URLs and other cases of content duplication.

The thing to keep in mind here is that you shouldn’t just set the redirects up. You need to fix the internal links themselves to avoid constantly triggering unnecessary redirects.

However, the thing to keep in mind here is the possible (though somewhat questionable) first link priority rule.

It states that if “Page A” links out to “Page B” twice, it’s only the first anchor text that counts to Google.

Thus, it might be a good idea to make your top navigation (which search engine bots discover before they get down to the main content) keyword-rich:

Cutting Down on Image Links

Google’s John Mueller warns against using image links without anchor texts:

“The one thing I would avoid doing is changing anchor text into an image. So if you have… a fancy font or something that you want to use on your pages and you change a link from being a text link to an image link and you don’t have any textual kind of connection with that image for that link then it’s really hard for us to understand what the anchor text is supposed to be.”

So, if you link between pages with images and for some reason wish the things to stay this way, at least make sure every image has a descriptive alt text.

Conclusion

I could go on and on about the various internal linking tactics and best practices. But the three covered aspects (hierarchy, authority, and keyword relevance) – are the three pillars you can start off from.

Finally, remember to:

Mind how a link’s importance is affected by its position on a page.

Be careful with onclick= links for JavaScript-based websites and other possible indexation problems.